Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 630

Third Party Screenshot Tools

March 22, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was the night we go out and do things in Final Fantasy XIV, but for a period of time before and after the events I got in some Mass Effect Andromeda. There are still aspects of the game that I really do love, and aspects that I am really struggling to cope with. I am trying really hard to come up with a headcanon that the 600 year cryo sleep has given pretty much everyone partial facial paralysis… because wow… just wow. It is fine more or less when dealing with the normal ins and outs of missions… but when you take a romantic option you tread on some seriously painful uncanny valley territory. I am hoping we get later patches that adjust this, because it is mostly a distraction from what is otherwise a pretty solid game. I am having some weirdness with Ryder as well because I keep forgetting he isn’t Shepard. I mean I am playing a Mass Effect game and dealing with weird elder god robotic space magic stuff… and I am trying to approach the game as though I were my version of Shepard and it isn’t quite working out that way. Maybe over time I will stop doing this, but for now Ryder is very much “Not-Shepard” for me and doesn’t have much of an identity of his own. I get what they are trying to do with this game, but so far it feels like a pair of jeans that doesn’t quite fit right anymore but you are still trying to wear them. There is so much love and nostalgia for those “jeans”, but its a struggle to keep them pulled up and keep from mooning everyone.

Now the weirdest thing about this game so far is that no one seems to be able to find the screenshot key? I did some research last night and folks seemed to indicate it was F11… however that did not actually work for me. A second search this morning indicates that no… the game does not actually have a built in screenshot functionality and is relying on you to use some sort of a third party solution. I have personally used FRAPS for the better part of a decade, and especially when I started doing the daily blogging thing I needed the ability to have a predictable place where all of my screenshots would be. I’ve talked about this before but all of my screenshots get dumped into a single directory on each machine that I play games on… and then I pull those screenshots off onto network attached storage to sort into a Genre>Game directory structure for long term storage. Basically when I write my morning posts… I am still waking up and I really need to make things as easy on myself as humanly possible. Trying to remember what the hell the screenshot directory for this or that game is at 5:30 in the morning is not something I excel at. Knowing that any recent shots are going to be in G:\Gameshots is much much easier, and with Windows 10 showing off recently used directories… it is also almost always easily available. FRAPS unfortunately costs money, and is outdated… and at this point is not the most amazing thing in the world… but it is extremely reliable and seems to be willing to take screenshots of anything. It does have the nice side effect of having a one time fee of $37… and then lifetime free updates. It feels sort of dirty that I had to point that out as a positive… because that used to be the way all software worked. I thought however I would cover a few other options that are “Not-FRAPS”.

GeForce Experience

This is probably the secondary go to for me, and with the introduction of Ansel technology I am contemplating making the switch myself. If you have a somewhat modern video card, it is almost certain to support ShadowPlay (gtx 650 or higher). GeForce Experience is the weird software that exposes this functionality, and also gives you some performance tweaking options. If you just want the ability to play games without having to fiddle with settings, you can launch the game once and then have Experience optimize the settings. In all cases the game will be playable… but I have found the software pretty conservative on quality settings especially if you are running in a generationally mismatched environment of an older CPU and newer Video Card. However for the sake of screenshots you can toggle on share options, which gives you access to set screenshot functionality. The reason why I am not already using this however is that there is no functionality for remapping your screenshot hotkey.

GeForce Experience Website

AMD Gaming Evolved

If you are on the Red team side of the house they have the AMD Gaming Evolved app… which you need to understand is just Raptr. At some point they either bought them or struck a deal with them… but installing the AMD tool is functionally installing a beefed up version of the Raptr gaming social media thing. It however offers screen shot functionality, but having not used this in years I cannot comment on how functional it is.

Raptr AMD Gaming Evolved Website

MSI Afterburner

Afterburner is a piece of software that has been around since the early days of PC Video Cards. In fact it was originally called RIVATuner if I am remembering correctly, that specifically relates to the Riva series of Nvidia cards from the late 90s. This is the go to software for overclocking, but it also has a bunch of packed in functionality… one of which is the ability to snap screenshots and record video clips. It is fairly light weight and just runs quietly in the background allowing you to take screenshots at will. My only suggestion here is to make sure you don’t fiddle with any of the settings that you are not comfortable with. You can absolutely crash your machine if you start playing with the sliders. The fact that it is “MSI” branded really should not throw you off, because they simply maintain the software these days and it still works for every brand of video card.

MSI Afterburner Website

Windows 10 Game DVR

Included as part of the Windows 10 installation is the Xbox app, which among other things exposes something called the Game DVR. This does some things that are good and some things that are not so good. The not so good is that it will start recording gameplay footage, in a rolling loop of the last X minutes which is configurable. The idea being that it gives you easy access to snag clips of gameplay footage AFTER it happens. This also means that your system will be effectively recording video all of the time, and a certain bit of diskspace will simply just be lost to this process. The positive is that it allows you to also set up a screenshot keybind without installing any additional software. I’ve noticed a decent performance hit while this option is turned on, so this is largely why I do not personally choose to use it. It is however there so I thought I would cover it as an option.

Windows 10 Game DVR Adjustment Settings

Forge.gg

In a similar “gaming DVR” camp is Forge which should be mentioned. This is software that essentially allows you to broadcast your gameplay and after a session trim clips from it to save to the Forge website. One of the options is to take still frames from this DVR footage, which also seemed a bit more contorted than I really wanted it to be for just taking screenshots. However there are a ton of people that love the software, and the ability to stream without needing to do much of anything special. I am throwing it out there because it technically can take decent screenshots, but it functions so vastly differently than what I want a screenshot software to function like.

Forge.gg Website

These are just a few options that I can think off off the top of my head at 6 in the morning. There are countless other pieces of software that do some version of this functionality. I continue to use FRAPs largely because it works like want it to work, and doesn’t seem to consume much in the way of system resources. It is also extremely reliably… several other options I have tried in the past like DxTory or Greenshot have both created situations where I thought I was taking a screenshot… and ended up with either nothing, black screens, or pictures of my desktop icons. While I absolutely can talk at length about the virtues of using some form of third party screenshot software… and having a filing system for said screenshots… I can’t really push one piece of software over another. You are ultimately going to need to try a bunch of them and find the one that seems to work with your gaming style. Any of the ones I mentioned save for maybe Forge is going to probably function exactly how you want.

Going to Space

March 21, 2017 by Belghast

I did not in fact stay up last night and play Andromeda, but man was it hard not to. Over the weekend I got to play some of the early access trial and to be honest this game at least in the early minutes of game play is exactly what I liked about the Mass Effect series. However first let me talk about the trial a bit before I go into that. You got the trial through being an Origin Access subscriber. Being in Origin Access gives you a discount on game purchases… that is roughly about what a month of the subscription is so it was honestly a no brainer to do that given that the discount functionally paid for itself. Through this it unlocked a 10 hour trial of the game… which seemed weird but I figured there was no way I would actually play all ten hours. So I pre-loaded the Trial and the game and wandered off on my mini vacation. Friday night when I got back into town, I sat down on the sofa and booted the game on my laptop, fiddling around with the character creator before my wife suggested it was bed time. I agreed and exited the game, expecting to have 9.5 hours worth of game play waiting on me. While the game exited completely and was missing from my hotbar… it was apparently still resident in memory somehow and Origin sat there ticking away my trial time while I slept. When I got up the next morning, ate breakfast and finally settled in to do some gaming… I was extremely disappointed to find out that according to Origin I had completed my trial time.

At the suggestions of Ashgar I tried using Origin customer support, because apparently in the past he had good luck with it. That was not really the case for me, because firstly the live chat feature did not appear to be working and instead of telling me that on screen while I was waiting for chat to load… it sent me an email telling me that to resolve my issues I needed to call the support center. That is a huge strike against any customer service, if I actually have to call and talk to someone…. especially given that I have a hard enough time explaining my problem without having to also attempt to decode a vastly different accent and speech pattern than that of my own. They had the option to ask for the support to call you, whenever someone was available and I did this… but knew immediately things were going to not go well when they asked me to get on the machine that had Origin installed. They started pushing me through steps to verify that Origin was installed… without actually listening to the issue that I was having. After about thirty minutes of working through someones flip file of instructions I finally got them to listen to the real issue, which was that Mass Effect did not fully close… and it ate up every last bit of my trial time. They gave me back 5 hours of trial time, which was frustrating given that I should have had 9.5 hours…. but after the frustrations I was ready to just settle for anything. Side note… if you ever do an Origin trial… make sure the game exits completely and open task manager to kill anything that looks connected to it. I even went so far as to kill origin itself and the memory resident helper program. This isn’t just a me thing because apparently the exact same bug happened to Tam yesterday and cost him whatever remained of his trial.

The next big bullet point is that the real fun for me with Mass Effect is leading a team and running missions. As a result my favorite Mass Effect game to date is the second one, because it had the most “Star Trek Away Team” moment, where we landed on a planet to assess what was going on and end up stumbling into adventure. The story of the series is excellent, but it isn’t necessarily the hook for me. Similarly the romance elements are interesting enough, but definitely not why I play the game and feel more like a mini game within the game. I feel all of this is important because lots of different people play Mass Effect for completely different reasons. So far… the game is scratching all of my itches and giving me a significantly better combat system to improve the feeling of exploring the galaxy. What I always wanted was a game that offered the same sort of tactical missions that the second game had…. with the ability to literally land on any world that the first game had… and it seems like maybe Andromeda is at least heading in that direction. Granted I have only just done the intro mission and am now exploring the first tutorial planet, but so far so good.

Please note there are absolutely some detractors to this game. Firstly even though it was the ammunition for some horrific bullshit… and I do not want to have any part of that… the animations are bad. It is no so much that the animations are bad themselves… it just feels like the rigging that attaches animations to the models is somehow faulty. Sometimes it is perfectly fine, and other times….. it is inhuman and creepy as your character duck walk runs through an area. The truth is though that this is nothing new and there have been countless other games with model and animation issues out of the gate… and I am hoping with additional patching this will go away. If not… I am hoping that someone releases an unofficial patch or mod that fixes it since playing on the PC gives me access to a bunch of these… I am looking at you play dough hair from Dragon Age Inquisition. Given that the models and animations are not why I am playing the game, I can look past them and get on with the fit bits of game play but they are most definitely immersion breaking.

The other big issue I have is the new dialog system. No I am not talking the lack of red and blue options but more the way that the game just zooms you into conversation without sending you to a secondary interface. Situations like this happen where I am talking to someone but doing so in an extremely awkward fashion that occludes most of the character to character interactions. A lot of the problems I have experienced with animation screw ups have happened while exiting the dialog system, so I am wondering if the two are connected. In the above image I snapped the shot just after exiting dialog and there is some weird layer separation going on with the colors. If you look at some of the edges you can really see it… but it is as though the RGB layers are askew. It fixes itself with time but during the dialog itself it feels like my eyes are out of focus. I don’t necessarily mourn the loss of Vanguard and Renegade the way most people seem to… considering I rarely if ever took the renegade option. Like sure… if I was tracking down a bad guy I would sometimes take the renegade option and shoot them in the head, but in moment to moment character interaction I am at my core a hero type. I find it damned near impossible to play a Sith or true dark sider in SWTOR… and that same thing spills over into Mass Effect.

All in all I have enjoyed the game quite a bit, in spite of its faults and am looking forward to getting home tonight and roaming the Andromeda galaxy. Ash, Tam and I are I think going to give the multiplayer a spin and in theory I got enough freebie packs that allow me to create something resembling a character load out that I like. I did not go with the super extra deluxe version that included some boosters, largely because multiplayer was not near the thing for me as it was my friends. However I am totally down for giving it a proper whirl. What I want to see however is more of these worlds and what exactly I can do to fix them. Mass Effect Andromeda already has me in its grip, and I don’t think it is going to really lose me any time soon. While I acknowledge there are issues, I am just taking a low sodium approach to it and realizing that there is a lot of good there that happens to cater to my very specific interests.

Weekend Adventures

March 20, 2017 by Belghast

Today marks the first day back from a bit of a vacation. As a result I must apologize for failing completely to write anything Friday. I had every intent of making it an upside down day where I blog in the evening, however after getting home Friday night that just sort of evaporated. I am leading the post off with a Mass Effect Andromeda screenshot, but I admit this is a little bit of bait and switch given that I am probably not going to be writing about that game at all until tomorrow morning. Instead this morning I am going to talk about my adventures. For the wife it has been spring break, and generally speaking we attempt to do something during that time. When we traveled through Dallas on the way home from Pax South in January, we realized it had been a significant amount of time since we just went to the Metro for the sake of going there. Another thing you need to know about us, is that we are die hard Half Priced Books fans… and for those not indoctrinated into that chain of book stores please click through this link and join the cult. To call it a used book store is a bit of a disservice to just how many cool things they tend to have and how many genres they cross. The only problem is there are none in the Tulsa metro area, however we regularly make a trip down the turnpike to Oklahoma City and hit the three that are located there. Additionally any time we travel we see if there are any in the nearby area that we can either hit on the way there or on the way home. As a result we have explored many in the Kansas City, St Louis, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Madison areas, and a few singlets we have found along the way.

Similarly I also love Micro Center and Fry’s Electronics… but we have neither of those chains. I make an attempt to hit them any time I am in the vicinity, so combing those two goals we had this idea of trying to hit as many stores as we could. What we did not figure in is just how damned big the Metro is, and how much time we would lose simply in travelling. Additionally we threw in a trip to IKEA which is always a must, and Container Store… as well as a slew of Target and Walmart stores to hunt for interesting clearance. The end result is that over the course of what was functionally a day and a half in the Metro we hit I believe 10 Half Priced Book Stores, 2 Fry’s, the single solitary Micro center, IKEA and one of the several Container Stores. The last we largely manages to catch because there happened to be one across the street from the In and Out burger we stopped at for lunch on Friday. As far as eating establishments, we managed to hit Fuzzy’s Tacos for lunch on Thursday and an apparent local chain called Snuffers for dinner that night as well as the previously mentioned In and Out. As far as wandering… my wife and I are extremely “drift compatible” when it comes to exploring new areas. The only problem is… we did not even touch the Forth Worth area stores because we did not always take the most optimum routes. That is one thing I really want… the ability to throw a bunch of points on a map and have google plot the most optimal course to hit all of them. We also did not exactly stay in the most optimal location either… with me picking a random hotel in Richardson with quite possibly the most uncomfortable beds I have ever slept in. All in all however it was fun trip, and as is always the case I took some photos of things that I found interesting… which is more than likely going to be the bulk of the rest of this post.

At one of the HPB stores, I found a copy of Magic the Gathering Arena… which in itself was not that big of a deal. However what was interesting is that in the back of the book nobody had detached and sent in the coupon for the free card. I’ve mangled a triptych of images here so you can see the book cover, the coupon as well as the card that you would have gotten had you turned in it. I believe I have this card laying around somewhere, because while the book was pretty crummy… at the time I was absolutely after any card I could get my hands on.

Another interesting find is some Blizzard Noobz figures circa Blizzcon 2009. They had the Murloc, Undead, and Ragnaros but sadly had none of the Jim Raynor which is probably the coolest of the set. I ended up picking up the Ragnaros because I always liked that one as well. I was just sort of shocked to see them still in the wild… and even more so that they had been marked down to $5.

In the straight up odd department, at IKEA I found this interesting “hanging dryer” as the sign said. Some googling tells me that this is extremely popular with the “cloth diaper” community. Whatever the case… it is an adorable octopoid hanger and was worth taking a photo of.

Finally in the just straight up weird category… one of the various stores I hit had a Daryl Dixon Funko Pop… that was literally the size of someones head. I was trying to figure out what I could hold up for scale… and wound up using my hand but that may or may not be useful given that my hands are also huge. You can however see a normal pop box on the shelf below for a potentially better reference.

In the realm of “Bel has lost his damned mind” another happening over the extended four day weekend… is that I decided to shave back down to a mustache/goatee combo. I just felt like I needed a change for awhile after doing a perfect impression of Hagrid for the better part of the last few years. This photo was snapped while recording AggroChat because my co-hosts could not believe that I actually did it, so that is why you get garbage lighting conditions and a microphone in my face.

Finally we wrapped the weekend with officially opening our back yard for the spring. This means that my wife and I spent most of Saturday afternoon collecting leaves, spraying for weeds… and applying a copious amount of fungicide to our very tree-like red tipped photinias. The best part of this is of course that our patio just off the bedroom is now open for business, and my wife spent most of Sunday out there grading in the shade of our balcony. Tonight I need to drag all ten bags of assorted yard debris around to the curb so that the trash service can pick them up on Tuesday. The way our town works, is that we have to use these rather expensive bags that have the city name printed all over them, which in turn get filtered off into a green waste system. The alternative was to buy a second trash bin, but that also limits you to only having a fixed amount each week. This way we can clean the yard whenever we get the desire to do so and simply pay for bags. Whatever the case the yard is open once more… and I’ve already gotten several birds coming to check out the feeder. Yesterday we had a couple of gorgeous cardinals and a pair of blue jays, and it seems like the nesting pairs of turtles doves are back as well. Now I just need to find me a switch so I can hang out on the back patio and play in style.

Failed Intentions

March 16, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I had every intention of playing the Mass Effect Andromeda trial, however that did not actually happen. It of course needed to install, and one of the things about Final Fantasy XIV is that when something is thrashing the hard drive… like a game download it becomes nigh unplayable. I’ve seen many games that are cpu bound, and even more than a graphics card bound… but FFXIV is the first game I have played ever that was truly hard drive bound. In theory I am guessing this is a side effect of needing to run on systems like the PS3 where there are simply not that many system resources, so instead of loading a bunch of stuff in memory the game is constantly caching bite sized chunks of the world. The end result works extremely well, and is probably why the game seems to be able to run on literally anything. However it also means that last night while Mass Effect was installing I could not partake of my most common PC diversion… chain running Palace of the Dead. So instead I decided to filter off to the bedroom to “play a little Zelda while the game installed” and wound up playing until midnight. I said this over twitter the other day and I will repeat it again… that I feel like it is a testament to just how damned good this game is that I have very serious issues with certain aspects of it and still find myself constantly playing it.

The thing that I find absolutely amazing about it is how well it supports my “oooh a piece of candy” approach to most games. I am not following any semblance of a pattern in exploring this world and the game seems completely fine with that. I feel like I have barely scratched the first three areas… and then found myself wandering into Zora’s Domain last night and following that chain of events. A good chunk of the night was spent trying to unlock towers…. only to find out that several of them are at least theoretically blocked by Guardians. As of yet I really do not have a good answer for them… and they are sort of a dalek-esc death force as they try and EXTERMINATE! There is nothing quite like the change in music when a Guardian has locked onto you, because you know that any minute you are going to see the target on your back and you are frantically looking for anything that could serve as cover. The other thing I really don’t have an answer to is spike traps, because I found a shrine in my extremely sporadic travels that was completely blocked by spikes… and the earlier answer was to get up high enough and glide down. The problem this time is there really was nothing to actually glide down from… so I am guessing that is simply not a puzzle I can solve at the moment. The core of my gaming focus seems to be on finding shrines, beating shrines… and then going to find more shrines. I literally was caught in this loop until midnight when I realized I probably should get some sleep considering I am driving to Dallas today.

Based on the results of last weekends podcast… there really is no way I can put into words why this game works for me. Any time I attempt to explain it I get bogged down in the grindy aspects of it, and the constant hunt for new weapons. However there is a core game here that is really damned amazing. Once you remove the durability problems and the wonky gyro puzzles… you are left with the core Zelda game I always wanted. I feel about this world the same way as I felt about the original Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo. It was this big open space with all sorts of mysteries to unlock. Its the little things… like when you lift up a boulder and see an insect or frog scurry out from under it… that you can then catch and use to make potions. The world feels vast and empty at times… but it really isn’t. Every copse of trees is placed there with purpose and reason… and many hold puzzles that unlock one of the around 900 korok seeds that are available. This is if nothing else a game about exploration and trying things until you can figure out how to make something work. The shrines are essentially the ultimate form of this expression, and as I have gotten deeper into the game… they are no longer the “use this one effect” style and more “chain everything you know how to do in different ways” effect. There was a puzzle last night where I had to use ice blocks to get objects out of the water… and throw them into a metal basket that I could then lift in the air with my magnetic ability and use the wall to tip the basket over and dump them onto a target. It took me quite a bit to realize that was my end goal and how to maneuver all of the elements into place to get it to work… and I found it an overall awesome experience. The part that I find interesting is how much I don’t mind the constant “Game Over” screen, because there is almost always a save just around the corner from wherever you happened to die… and you can get right back into the action almost immediately.

Functionally this month has not gone at all like planned… I expected to be spending all of my time in Horizon Zero Dawn… and instead I seem to be logging way more hours in Zelda at the moment. I also did not expect to be feverishly searching for a switch… with the realization that if I find one I will ultimately start over from scratch again. In any case I need to wrap this up and get on the road. Just a heads up to my loyal readers, I will not be doing a morning post tomorrow and instead be doing some sort of an evening post when I finally get home. Until then I would love to hear your thoughts on Zelda and if it is nearly as sticky for you as it seems to be for me.